Earthways Center Teaches by Example

This St. Louis, Missouri, teaching center promotes green building and home performance through its guided tours and training programs while serving as a model for green and energy-efficient design.

EarthWays Center, a division of Missouri Botanical Garden, promotes sustainable energy and resource use. Based in a stately old brick home in midtown St. Louis that has been completely renovated to model sustainability in buildings and personal lifestyle choices, its educational programs have earned respect throughout Missouri and around the Midwest, addressing energy efficiency, recycling and waste reduction, air quality, and green building. Expertise of the current staff includes environmental education, public policy, engineering, media communications, and multiple specialties they like to call applied sustainability. This 1885 vintage Victorian has been through cycles of major change. Originally a gracious single-family home, it was abandoned by its last live in owner and stood vacant for over 13 years. The house had become a derelict shell by the early 1990s, an ideal candidate for a gut rehab. A local environmental group raised $1/2 million in cash and contributed goods and services, and redeveloped the site for educational use. It was opened to the public in 1994. The EarthWays facility houses an impressive array of green features, including a groundsource heating and cooling system for the first floor and a high-efficiency gas furnace for the second floor; 2 x 6 reframing of all exteriorwalls and superinsulation using blown-in cellulose ...